Op-Ed: When Love Feels Like Regret

Caregiving, especially over many years, is an act of devotion that reshapes every corner of a person’s life. It asks for time, patience, emotional energy, and often, the quiet surrender of one’s own needs. Yet when the loved one dies, the caregiver is often left not with relief or peace, but with a deep sense of failure. Did I do enough? Was I kind enough? Should I have seen something sooner? These questions loop endlessly, as though love itself requires a final audit.

But guilt, in its purest sense, implies wrongdoing — that we’ve done something bad, failed to meet a moral or personal standard. That simply isn’t true for most caregivers. The “guilt” that follows the end of care is rarely evidence of moral failure. It is, instead, a reflection of love distorted by exhaustion, grief, and the impossible standard of perfection we impose on ourselves. When you’ve spent years being someone’s lifeline, it feels almost treacherous to believe you might have done enough.

Part of the problem is cultural. We are taught to equate love with self-sacrifice, to measure devotion by how much of ourselves we give away. In caregiving, that narrative becomes both inspiration and trap. The caregiver becomes accustomed to vigilance — always alert, always on duty. When the person they love is gone, the absence of that responsibility can feel like abandonment, and the mind rushes to fill the void with guilt. It’s easier, in some ways, to believe we failed than to accept that the loss was beyond our control.

Psychologists often describe guilt as grief’s “shadow emotion.” It offers the illusion of agency — if only I had done something differently, the outcome might have changed. But this is a false comfort. The truth is far harder to face: that no amount of love or care can halt the inevitable. Guilt, then, becomes a way of wrestling with helplessness, a way of keeping the loved one close by replaying what can no longer be undone.

The tragedy is that this guilt often isolates the caregiver just when they most need connection. Friends say, “You did so much,” but the words bounce off. Validation from others rarely penetrates the private reckoning of someone who feels they’ve fallen short. The only person who can offer release is the one carrying the guilt — and that act of self-forgiveness can feel impossibly out of reach.

But it is not impossible. It is, in fact, essential. Forgiving oneself is not a betrayal of the loved one’s memory. It is the continuation of love, redirected inward. The compassion that once guided the care of another must now be turned toward the self. To tell yourself, I did enough, is not denial — it is truth, spoken gently and bravely.

For Janis, that realization came slowly. Months after her mother’s passing, she began to recognize that her guilt was not a measure of her failings but of her love — that her years of care had been acts of steadfast devotion, not imperfection. The relief did not come all at once, but with each acknowledgment that her mother’s peace was not dependent on her own perfection.

To anyone who has walked this path: you showed up. You gave what you had, even on the days when it felt like nothing was left to give. That is enough. The final act of care, the one no one teaches us, is to release ourselves from the guilt we never deserved. In doing so, we honor both our loved ones and the enduring grace of our own humanity.